Mind expanding: How to hack your attention span


(Image: Sally Anscombe/Getty)


Boost your ability to pay attention and you can improve at almost anything. Here are the latest tips for bringing your brain's two attention systems to heel


Almost every useful feature of your brain begins with attention. Attention determines what you are conscious of at any given moment, and so controlling it is just about the most important thing that the brain can do.


To make any sense of the world around us we need to filter out almost everything and focus solely on what is relevant. Not only that, but focused attention is essential for learning or memorising. So it follows that if you can boost your ability to pay attention, you can improve at almost anything.


In simple terms, the brain has two attention systems. One, the "bottom-up" system, automatically snaps awareness to potentially important new information, such as moving objects, sudden noises ...


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